The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolized

Charubel's central work first appeared as a series of articles in Alan Leo's Astrologer's Magazine, running from December 1890 over roughly three years, before being gathered into book form as The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolized in 1898. For each of the 360 degrees of the zodiac he supplied a short symbolic image meant to be read alongside the ordinary astrological meaning of the degree, a format that anticipated, by more than a generation, the better known project Marc Edmund Jones and Elsie Wheeler carried out in 1925.

No direct textual link between Charubel's images and the later Sabian material has been established in the sources reviewed here; the two projects are independent efforts in the same genre rather than one drawing on the other. What can be said is that Charubel's book set a durable precedent within Western astrology for treating each of the 360 degrees as the occasion for its own distinct symbolic picture, a format the later and more widely known Sabian Symbols shares without, so far as is documented, having borrowed from it directly. Where the Sabian material eventually reached a global audience through Jones's and later Rudhyar's published keynotes, Charubel's degrees remained a comparatively specialist reference, kept in circulation mainly through reprints such as the 1907 edition rather than through any single canonical restatement.